Wednesday

Schools in Tabernacle will lose special education teachers and administrators as the district faces state aid reductions.

TABERNACLE — Amy Brewin was surprised when she found out her position as a special education teacher at Tabernacle Elementary School wouldn’t be renewed because of a loss of funding from the state.

In her three years helping children with special needs integrate into general education classrooms as an inclusion teacher, she consistently earned “highly effective” ratings in her evaluations every year from her principal and curriculum director, her attorney, Jerry Tanenbaum, told the township board of education Monday night.

Students respected her. Her principal hailed her as a role model. The school helped her go back to college for a master’s degree that she’s one class away from finishing. And she’s also a mother to two sons enrolled in Tabernacle’s schools.

“She’s at the tip-top in the district,” said Tanenbaum, a Cherry Hill education lawyer who specializes in representing students with disabilities. “All of them say she’s the best that they could possibly rate.”

Brewin’s appearance Monday night could easily be one of hundreds of so-called Donaldson hearings — an informal appearance before the board of education to try to persuade the board to retain a teacher who has been serviced a non-renewal notice — around the state.

Tabernacle is one of more than a dozen districts in Burlington County grappling with reductions in state aid over the next seven years as a result of state school funding law changes, which were intended to correct funding discrepancies and shortfalls to some districts from the past decade.

While the law kept the state’s basic school funding formula intact, it began to phase out and redistribute adjustment aid, which is funding the state created so districts with shrinking enrollment or changing demographics did not lose funding. It phases out their extra aid over seven years and redistributes it to growing districts, which had been underfunded.

The redistribution is leaving some districts with the tough decisions to cut personnel and programs.

Brewin isn’t the only staff reduction in Tabernacle either. Along with her, two other special education teachers, the elementary school principal and the curriculum director were let go, and an art teacher’s job was changed to part-time. The middle school principal will now assume the role for both schools, officials said.

“No one wants to remove anybody,” said Superintendent Glenn Robbins, who is also part of the statewide initiative “Support Our Students” to advocate for changes to the state’s school funding formula. “That’s why I’m battling at a state level. It’s beyond frustrating. I’ve spent more time in Trenton than ever before trying to fight for Tabernacle.”

Support Our Schools is lobbying for more overall education funding and other measures to reduce the impact.

In the upcoming school year alone, Tabernacle is expected to lose $312,893 in state aid for the 2019-20 school year. In 2025, the end of the seven years over which some schools’ aid will be reduced, Robbins said Tabernacle schools could lose an estimated $2.6 million, decimating the district’s budget. Altogether, the Lenape Regional High School District and the six districts that send students there would lose almost $23 million in funding over the next seven years.

Brewin said she’s concerned that kindergarten and first-grade classrooms won’t have a full-time inclusion teacher in each grade after three teachers are let go. Not having an inclusion teacher in the classroom for the full day would “leave the students without the proper accommodations and modifications to give them the best opportunity to be academically and socially successful,” Brewin said.

“You’re taking from a department that needs these teachers,” Tanenbaum said to the board Monday on Brewin’s behalf. “Kids won’t progress as much as they did before, you’re going to have parents who are upset. Some students in self-contained classes are going to be pushed into general classes without the support of an inclusion teacher.”

Robbins said students won’t be harmed by the staff changes.

He said the district’s overall population has decreased from 1,000 to about 720 over the past decade — and that includes the population of students with disabilities too. Robbins said some inclusion teachers were already part-time, and student enrollment was so low, “you could count the students on one hand between the two grades.” Both the kindergarten and first-grade classrooms are also equipped with teacher’s aides, he said.

Though Robbins doesn’t want to let go of staff members, he fears it’ll be a common occurrence for schools in the area over the next few years, affecting hundreds of school employees. He said Tabernacle has even encouraged families to write to their legislators regarding school funding.

“We’ve been fiscally responsible as possible while updating security measures to protect our staff and students,” Robbins said. “There’s no perfect equation. Regardless of who’s selected (for nonrenewal), no one would be happy. I wish the state wasn’t putting us in this position.”

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